Dollars and Cents

Shailene Woodley is Now Officially a Movie Star

Shailene Woodley’s part may have been cut from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but as it turns out, she didn’t need a superhero to snag her own summer blockbuster. The Fault in Our Stars, the teenage weepie adapted from John Green’s bestselling book, opened to a mammoth $48.2 million over the weekend, easily trouncing the big-budget sci-fi competition Edge of Tomorrow. That Tom Cruise vehicle made just $29.1 million domestically; given the $175 million budget cited in The Hollywood Reporter, it will need to rely heavily on international audiences to have a prayer of making its money back.

But back to The Fault in Our Stars, which counts as a major victory for everyone involved—Woodley, who is now a bona fide rising star; her co-star Ansel Elgort, whose tongue-twisting name is now known to every teenager in America; Fox 2000, who released the film; Josh Boone, who directed it; and Green, the author whose book Paper Towns is already in the works as a movie, and who is now indisputably the face of the post-Twilight generation of films for young people.

Actually make that young women: 82 percent of the weekend’s audience for The Fault in Our Stars was female, and 79 percent of it under the age of 25. Between this and Maleficent, which came in a respectable second place for the weekend, female audiences are driving some of the summer’s biggest hits, a phenomenon that’s still somehow considered rare, despite lots of recent examples. Woodley and Angelina Jolie are drastically different kinds of movie stars at very different stages in their careers, but they’ve both recently proven how sticking to their iconoclastic personas—Jolie as a star who hasn’t been on-screen in four years, Woodley as a starlet willing to chop off her hair and lead a weepie—can pay off. Maleficent is already part of a massive fairy tale trend; after this weekend, it’s clear The Fault in Our Stars is ready to kick off its own trend as well. The Hunger Games may still be the bigger franchise, but The Fault in Our Stars is the future.